Friday, January 16, 2015

Top Ten Films

(originally published in The Outreach
Connection in July 2004. I subsequently updated my list here - it hasn't changed much since then)

The Australian website SensesOfCinema.com
has a section devoted to lists of top ten films, and I like that kind of thing,
so I sent mine in. Here it is:

Celine
and Julie Go Boating(Jacques Rivette)

Citizen
Kane(Orson Welles)

Dog
Star Man(Stan
Brakhage)

The
King of Comedy(Martin
Scorsese)

Love
Streams(John Cassavetes)

Ordet(Carl Dreyer)

Orpheus(Jean Cocteau)

Playtime(Jacques Tati)

The
Passenger(Michelangelo
Antonioni)

Rio
Bravo(Howard Hawks)

I added the following note:

which of course fails to do justice to
Hitchcock, Bresson, Pasolini and at least twenty others. If the object were to
select ten films for a desert island, I would have to find room somewhere for
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Band Wagon.

A day later, at least half that list might
have changed. For instance, I regret the omission of That Obscure Object of Desire and Bonnie and Clyde, and although I’m wary of placing too much weight
on recent passions, I think it’s likely that Bamboozled is in fact one of my ten favourites. As for what I did
include, I haven’t actually seen Celine and
Julie go Boating for years, so I’m not completely sure it belongs on there.
But the list had to include a Rivette movie, and this somehow seemed like the
best one. Similarly, Dog Star Man
represents my current passion for Brakhage as a whole. As I get less and less
impressed with Scorsese’s current work, it feels on some level as though The King of Comedy should drop off the
list, and yet it hangs in there.

Man of Culture

There are no silent films on my list (Metropolis or The General would probably come closest, but that felt a bit too
dutiful) and nothing from the 30’s, but otherwise the distribution across the
decades isn’t too bad. I wish there was something from there from outside the
US or Europe – maybe seeing Ozu’s Tokyo
Story again soon will push it up there. It’s a source of great joy to me to
own seven of the ten on DVD (in addition to Celine
and Julie, I eagerly await the release of Love Steams and The Passenger).

I guess this tells you, in a general sort
of way, that my highbrow inclinations are palpable, but not yet overwhelming.
Still, I admit that the list is conditioned in part by some abstract sense of
what my list ought to look like. Once I was in Italy for a business thing, and
the host, who sat next to me at dinner, turned out to be a film enthusiast (to
add some colour to the story, he knew Liliana Caviani who made The Night Porter). We exchanged
observations on Antonioni and Pasolini and Lindsay Anderson’s If and suchlike, and then he looked at
me directly and said, “I must ask you a very important question. Do you like
Fellini?”

With no hesitation, I gave the truthful
response, which was: “No, I’ve never cared for Fellini.” He beamed – that was
the right answer. “You are a true man of culture,” he said. He even agreed with
me that Fellini’s Toby Dammit episode
from Spirits of the Dead was the
director’s best work (partly because it’s shorter than the others). I was as
pleased as Punch with this (being called a true man of culture, by an Italian
guy!) But since then, I’ve started to reassess Fellini upwards. I watched La Dolce Vita again a few months ago and
was completely knocked out by it. But no matter what, I can’t imagine placing a
Fellini film on my top ten list. It’ll never fit the image now.

The most conventional presence on my list
is Citizen Kane, which has topped the
best-established exercise of this kind (a critics' poll carried out every ten
years by Sight and Sound) since 1962.
Jean Renoir’s La Regle du Jeu seemed
to be closing in on Kane, until Vertigo zoomed past it into second place
in 2002 (Vertigo might be 11th
on my own list). The 2002 Sight and Sound
poll had The Godfather/The Godfather II
in fourth place – Coppola’s achievement now looks increasingly like the very
rare work that will stand as both a popular and a critical classic. The rest of
the 2002 top ten looks like this: Tokyo
Story, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Battleship Potemkin, Sunrise, 8 1/2 (Fellini!), Singin’ in the Rain.

Sight
and Sound also carried out a poll of directors,
which Citizen Kane also won, with The Godfather I and II in second. Lawrence of Arabia and Raging Bull are among the alternative
choices on that list. Senses of Cinema
provides various other polls as well, all but one of them showing Citizen Kane as number one (and the
exception had it at second, behind La
Regle du Jeu).

Time of Plenty

There’s also a “Best Movies of all time”
website based on an amalgamation of various sources, which generates the
following top ten: Citizen Kane, La Regle
du Jeu. Vertigo, 8 1/2, Battleship Potemkin, Singin in the Rain, The Gold Rush,
City Lights, L’Avventura and Schindler’s
List . Spielberg’s film scores nowhere in most of these polls, but given
the weighting system employed by that website, got in by virtue of winning the Oscar
and various other awards (the same list has Ben-Hur
as the 24th best film ever made).

Of course, the list-making exercise isn’t
limited to highbrow circles. The American Film Institute has recently been
drumming up good publicity for itself with various tabulations of best American
movies. In its master list, Kane was
number one, followed by Casablanca, The
Godfather and Gone with the Wind
– obviously following a more populist bent. And perhaps the most credible list
of them all in a certain way, by virtue of the numbers of people contributing
to it (over 100,000 voters for some films), is on the Internet Movie Database
at imdb.com. The Godfather is number
one there, followed – to me bizarrely, but you can’t ignore it – by The Shawshank Redemption. All three Lord of the Rings movies show up in the
top ten, so I guess by this measure we’re living in a time of plenty. The only
foreign movie in the top twenty is The
Seven Samurai; Kane is 11th (just behind Star Wars).

I think the fleeting nature of watching
films encourages this kind of exercise: making lists, scrapbooks, collecting
memorabilia – it’s all a way of compensating for the intangibility of the thing
itself, of providing some proof that we really invested all that time, that our
memories have some basis in reality. I’m not much for collecting memorabilia,
but as you can see, I’m into the lists, and for years now I’ve written notes, a
few hundred words or so, on every film I see. Where that all gets me, I don’t
know. Now, excuse me while I reconsider a few things.

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).